“ ‘I want to be taught. What do you want me to learn?’

“ ‘I knew you were quite extraordinarily intelligent. More than intelligent, really. Intelligent people are so often thoroughly horrid. You are truly sensitive. I want you to learn to be exactly like Sir John.’

“ ‘Imitate him, you mean?’

“ ‘Imitations are no good. There have been people on the music-halls who have imitated him. No: if the thing is to work as we all want it to work, you must quite simply be him.’

“ ‘How, if I don’t imitate him?’

“ ‘It’s a very deep thing. Of course you must imitate him, but be careful he doesn’t catch you at it, because he doesn’t like it. Nobody does, do they? What I mean is—oh, dear, it’s so dreadfully difficult to say what one really means—you must catch his walk, and his turn of the head, and his gestures and all of that, but the vital thing is that you must catch his rhythm.’

“ ‘How would I start to do that?’

“ ‘Model yourself on him. Make yourself like a marvellously sensitive telegraph wire that takes messages from him. Or perhaps like wireless, that picks up things out of the air. Do what he did with the Guvnor.’

“ ‘I thought he was the Guvnor.’

“ ‘He is now, of course. But when we both worked under the dear old Guvnor at the Lyceum Sir John absolutely adored him, and laid himself open to him like Danae to the shower of gold—you know about that, of course?—and became astonishingly like him in a lot of ways. Of course Sir John is not so tall as the Guvnor; but you’re not tall either, are you? It was the Guvnor’s romantic splendour he caught. Which is what you must do. So that when you dance out before the audience juggling those plates they don’t feel as if the electricity had suddenly been cut off. Another pink gin, if you please.’

“I didn’t greatly like pink gin. In those days I couldn’t afford to drink anything, and pink gin is a bad start. But I would have drunk hot fat to prolong this conversation. So we had another one each, and Milady dealt with hers much better than I did. A pink gin later—call it ten minutes—I was thoroughly confused, except that I wanted to please her, and must find out somehow what she was talking about.

“When she wanted to leave I rushed to call her a taxi, but Holroyd was ahead of me, and in much better condition. He must have been in the Public Bar. We both bowed her into the cab—I seem to remember having one foot in the gutter and the other on the pavement and wondering what had happened to my legs—and when she drove off he took me by the arm and steered me back into the Public Bar, where we tucked into a corner with old Frank Moore.

“ ‘She’s been giving him advice and pink gin,’ said Holroyd.